The "Official Detective Stories" Version of 'American Tragedy' Murderpdf

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The 'American Tragedy' Murder

By Sheldon
Spears

On July 31,1934,
the body of twenty-six year old Freda McKechnie of
Edwardsville turned up in Harvey’s Lake at
Myers Grove, near Sandy Beach. Two teenagers
in a rowboat, Nathan Schoenburn and his girlfriend,
saw the body floating face down; it was also spotted
from the shore by a five year old girl, Betty DaCosta.

Shortly thereafter
police arrested Robert Allan Edwards, age twenty-three,
also of Edwardsville, and charged that he had bludgeoned
the pregnant McKechnie with a blackjack in order
to be free to marry the younger, wealthier and prettier
Margaret Crain, a native of upstate New York.

Theodore Dreiser
had published the most monumental of his novels,
An American Tragedy, in 1925. He based it on
an actual case that had unfolded in the vicinity
of Herkimer, New York, between 1905 and 1908. A
murdered woman, Grace Brown, was found with a bruise
on her forehead in Big Moose Lake. Investigators
learned that she and a man named Chester Gillette
were lovers, that she was pregnant by him, and that
he wished to marry another, and wealthier, woman. Gillette
was found guilty and electrocuted at Auburn Penitentiary
in March 1908.

The All-American
looking Robert Edwards, better known as Bobby, was
a young man whose aspirations for a college degree
had been sidetracked by the Depression. He
had to drop out of Mansfield State Teachers’ College
and take a job as a mine surveyor with the Kingston
Coal Company. At Mansfield he had met Margaret
Crain of East Aurora, New York, the sister of a prominent
clergyman; after graduation she became a high school
music teacher in Endicott, New York.

The two considered
themselves engaged, and Crain gave Edwards $125 for
a down payment on the purchase of an automobile.

Although he visited
Crain frequently, Edwards also sustained a relationship
with Freda McKechnie - their parents were friends. The
relationship was an intimate one, and McKechnie discovered
that she was pregnant in late July 1934. Doing
what was then the “honorable” thing,
Edwards promised to marry her. Since she apparently
loved him deeply, McKechnie’s last days were
among the happiest of her life.

On the evening
of July 30, Edwards and McKechnie drove to Harvey’s
Lake for a swim. What happened there constituted
the heart of the courtroom confrontation between
the prosecution and the defense when the trial
opened on October 1, 1934. Edwards admitted
hitting McKechnie over the head with a blackjack,
in shallow water, and of dumping her body in the
deeper part of the lake. DA Thomas Lewis
charged premeditation - that Edwards planned to
murder McKechnie so that he could marry Margaret
Crain. In support of this allegation, the
prosecution presented medical evidence indicating
trauma from a blow to the head as the cause of
death. Included too was the testimony of
Dr. Stanley Freeman, the prison physician, about
his conversation of August 4 with Edwards, which
Judge W.A. Valentine allowed despite the defense’s
objection that it was privileged (confidential)
information. According to Dr. Freeman, Edwards
had confessed that he had killed McKechnie because
he had another girl and because “he thought
he could get away with it.” In a second
conversation on August 17, Edwards told Dr. Freeman
that he had planned the murder while driving McKechnie
to Harvey’s Lake on July 30. Warden
William B. Healey disclosed that Edwards had made
essentially the same confession to him.

To underline the
charge that Edwards had committed murder to free
himself to marry “the other woman,” Assistant
DA J. Harold Flannery read excerpts from letters
written by the accused to Margaret Crain. A
gifted amateur actor with a beautiful voice, Flannery’s
delivery was extremely effective. Edwards
turned pale, several women left the courtroom,
and others became very fidgety while the letters
were being read. In them Edwards addressed
Crain as “Mamma,” “Darling,” “Honey,” “Darling
Wife,” and “Momet” - the last
a children’s mispronunciation of the name
Margaret. Among his expressions of passion
were the following: “It would kill me to
lose you;” “I love you, Momet dearest,
above all in the world;” and “The colliery
fires are cold compared to our love.” There
were 172 of these documents, which the prosecution
deemed not only “erotic” but incriminating.

[Apparently to
spare further embarrassment to Crain the trial
was halted at Edwards’ request and] Edwards
pleaded not guilty to first degree murder. Since
he had confessed to bludgeoning McKechnie, his
defense had to be, and was, a convoluted one. In
his version of events, McKechnie had just stepped
into a rowboat when she passed out. Edwards
tried to revive her but was unable to feel a pulse
or heart beat. In a panic, he returned to
shore and then to his automobile where he saw the
strap of the blackjack he carried for self-defense. His
testimony follows:

"It occurred to
me that if there was some mark on Freda’s
body, it
might make her death look like an accident, and
I would be left
out of it. I knew Freda was pregnant. I
knew she was not allowed
to swim and that she was not supposed to be with
me.

When I returned
to the boat she was in the same position. She
had not revived. I could do nothing. I
put her head over my
left arm and struck her on the back of the head
with the
blackjack. I didn’t even realize
what I had done and I carried
the body out to water up to my chest and let
it drop...."

It took the jury
only four-and-a-half hours, on October 6, 1934
to find Edwards guilty of murder and to recommend
the death sentence. On November 30 the court
en banc refused him a new trial, and on December
3 he was officially sentenced to death. Defense
attorney Frank A. McGuigan announced that the Edwards
family lacked the money to carry an appeal to the
Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Edwards was not
without his sympathizers, including a number of
character witnesses who testified on his behalf
at the trial. Margaret Crain and he had had
a tender-hearted meeting in jail on August 3, 1934,
shortly after his arrest. But she soon cut
herself off completely from the case, except to
provide the letters which played a key role in
Edwards’ conviction. She rebuffed
three defense requests to testify.

More than a thousand
people in Wyoming Valley appealed for a commutation
of Edwards’ sentence. However, the
most eloquent of all the supporters of clemency
was Theodore Dreiser himself. The most obvious
authority on American Tragedy-type cases, Dreiser
arrived in the Valley on September 7, 1934, on
assignment from the New York Post and The Mystery
Magazine. Within days he had interviewed
people in Edwardsville and visited Harvey’s
Lake, accompanied by his secretary, who took copious
notes. He returned to the area in early October
to cover Edwards’ trial. On one occasion,
in fact, Judge Valentine admonished him for making
(unconscious) facial expressions in front of the
jury when the pathologist responsible for the autopsy
was being cross examined.

Dreiser was a left-winger
critical of many aspects of American society. The
real tragedy in An American Tragedy was the national
obsession with money; and one of the quickest ways
of acquiring it was to marry it. Fortune-hunting
was a disease which occasionally resulted in murder. Within
this context, Dreiser thought Edwards less a callous
killer than a victim of pathological social pressures.

Edwards, Dreiser
wrote in the New York Post of October 5, 1934,
was certainly not the “brutal, soulless sensualist” portrayed
by the prosecution. With money he would have
gone back to college and solidified his relationship
with Margaret Crain. As for the letters,
they were nothing but “the emotional blather
of a boy of twenty-one.” He himself,
Dreiser admitted, had written such letters at that
age.

Dreiser actually
forwarded copies of his sympathetic analysis to
Pennsylvania’s governor and pardon board. Unfortunately
for the condemned man, the recipients were unmoved. At
12:35 a.m. on May 6, 1935, while reciting a prayer,
Robert Edwards died in the electric chair at Rockview. Whether
he was a calculating murderer, or, as Dreiser believed,
the product of a reprehensible system of moral
values, is still a matter of opinion. Until
the crime, his life was ostensibly normal, his
two-timing behavior to the contrary notwithstanding. Ironically,
about one year before his arrest, Edwards had wondered
aloud to a Plymouth acquaintance about the feelings
of a man facing execution. It was an experience
that ultimately would become his reality.